Climate bill blame game begins

Eighteen months ago, Barack Obama took office pledging to deal with a “planet in peril.”

His party held big majorities in Congress, and the House answered by passing a tough cap-and-trade bill. A massive climate conference in Copenhagen, with Obama at the center of the action, focused the world on the need to address global warming.

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Then came the nation’s worst-ever environmental disaster, an oil spill in the Gulf that put momentum behind environmentalists and scarred the image of big, polluting industries.

Add in a summer of record-high temperatures, and it would seem the stars had been aligned like never before for climate legislation.

But by Thursday, the White House’s biggest energy and environmental initiative sat in tatters, relegated to an unknown election-year abyss after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he didn’t yet have 60 votes and would instead move to the lowest hanging energy fruit.

The blame game has already begun.

One exasperated administration official on Thursday lambasted the environmentalists – led by the Environmental Defense Fund – for failing to effectively lobby GOP senators.

“They didn’t deliver a single Republican,” the official told POLITICO. “They spent like $100 million and they weren’t able to get a single Republican convert on the bill.”

But many say it was Obama who didn’t do enough to make the climate bill a big enough priority, allowing other monster big-ticket items like the economic stimulus, health care and Wall Street reform to suck up all the oxygen and leaving environmentalists grasping for straws too late in the game – well past the expiration date for other big accomplishments during the 111th Congress.

“The absence of direct, intense presidential leadership doomed this process,” said Eric Pooley, author of “Climate War,” a just-published book that chronicles the past three years of debate on global warming. “We did have a window there, and now the window is shut. It’s more about prying it back open than anything else.”

Going back to Day One, Obama never turned his campaign proposals into formal legislative text, leaving lawmakers to shoulder the load. And when Obama spoke publicly about the issue, it was only with a vague call for “comprehensive energy and climate” measures that did little to help win votes.

Obama’s hands-off approach didn’t matter as much in the House, where Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman and, later, Speaker Nancy Pelosi built their winning coalition region by region to scrap out a 219-212 vote just before the July 4, 2009 recess. But it was another story with his former colleagues in the Senate, where carbon caps had never topped 48 votes on the floor.